Resistance, Detainment, Asylum: The Onto-Political Limits of Border Crossing in North America

Inadmissible, deportable, undesirable, terrorist, no-fly list: all of these categories exist on a continuum that marks the border crosser. Crossing borders, even the borders that are understood to be “friendly,” often reveals the production of differentiated racial ontologies of immigrant/migrant communities situated within nation-states. The experience of border crossing is an ontological one whereby both the technologies used in border security and the mode of securitization are understood to have a profound effect on the immigrant and migrant communities within nation-states. In North America, as well as other “securitized” regions, the coupling of racial profiling strategies and the renewed politics of nationalizing identity as a response to the “War on Terror” has revealed the extent of the racial ontological formation of border crossing.